‘Luca’ Makes Big Splash as Most-Watched Streaming Movie in Nielsen’s Weekly Rankings

Pixar film that dropped June 18 on Disney+ racked up an impressive 1.5 billion viewing minutes in three days

LUCA Enrico Casarosa
Disney/Pixar

“Luca,” Pixar’s latest original animated film, posted an enormous debut when it dropped on Disney+ on June 18, being watched for 1.573 billion minutes in its first few days on streaming, according Nielsen.

Nielsen’s weekly streaming top 10 list showed that “Luca” topped all original movies for the week of June 14-20, beating out all other movies by a wide margin, and landing at No. 2 on the overall streaming rankings. In fact that number of viewers for one film would be more than enough to hit at No. 1 overall in most weeks, but the eight episodes of the series “Manifest” on Netflix was watched for 2.493 billion viewing minutes.

Disney+ also had three movies in the top 10 and two in the top 5 for the week of June 14, with “Loki” also landing at No. 4 and “Raya and the Last Dragon” landing at No. 10, performing strongly in its third straight week after ending its run on Disney+ as a Premier Access title.

For reference, “Raya” in its first week post-Premier Access logged just over 1 billion viewing minutes during the period of May 31-6, and for June 14 it had another 576 million viewing minutes, landing it at No. 3.

Falling just short of the top spot among original movies but still with a very impressive debut in its first few days on streaming was “Fatherhood,” a Sony film released through Netflix that stars Kevin Hart in a drama attempting to raise his young daughter as a single dad. The film logged 877 million viewing minutes and was the No. 5 streaming title of the week.

“Luca” was released as a Disney+ exclusive on June 18 at no additional charge to subscribers, following on the success of Pixar’s “Soul” and “Onward” in their own Disney+ debuts, despite the fact that Pixar films have traditionally been highly successful in drawing family audiences at the box office.

“Luca” is directed by Enrico Casarosa and is the story of a young sea monster in Italy who discovers that when he steps onto land he’s disguised as a human boy, leading him to have a summer friendship with another adventurous sea monster with dreams of living on the land and a human girl whose father is a hunter of their kind.

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